The lesson about the end of nuclear in Germany | Hacker News Reader

The lesson about the end of nuclear in Germany

jeromeaparis.substack.com

68 pointsEnimesnas263 comments

The failure of EDF in France is not due to nuclear power inherent limitations, but to massive underinvestment from the French government. The Energiewende has cost the Germans more than 150 billion €, all that with lenient EU regulations.

Whereas in France, the new EPR in Flamanville, for all it being talked about as a failed investment, has cost 1/10th of that. With 10x the money and economies of scale, we could have had a crazy nuclear capacity with very strict, modern standards.

Whether France will build nuclear or renewables, the problem is they had to do it 10 years ago.

> we could have had a crazy nuclear capacity with very strict, modern standards.

Would that help though, if drought periods hit Western Europe, like last year, and water levels in the rivers are as low as they were?

I'm sure, they can figure that out with something similar to irrigation channels and/or solar panels along river/channels to prevent evaporation. Would they do this? That's another question

0.18% of nuclear power generation was lost due to water levels and temperatures.

Also nothing stops you from building nuclear plants in other locations

In France last summer, some plants had indeed to be shut down because of the drought but:

* a minority of plants were involved, it was only an issue because it happened on top of other issues (planned maintenances delayed due to covid, corrosion issues)

* the problem isn't actually the drought, it was the heat. The plants could keep operating, but they would have rejected water too hot, in breach of environmental regulations.

Besides, new plants can be built close to the sea instead of rivers to account for that.

> Besides, new plants can be built close to the sea instead of rivers to account for that.

I think that's a no-go due to the salt in the water that will corrode pipes etc. Not an expert on that, though, obviously.

All the other points don't sound too good either: Corrosion issues, let's fuck up nature with hot water, not very good at all.

It's possible to build nuclear plants by the sea, and it's actually commonly built. There are some in France, China, Korea, etc.

Nuclear power has high upfront investments, always. And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget. After a couple of decades of this, reasonable people may come to the conclusion that these investments and risks are quite "inherent".

Your comparison is meaningless, because the 150 billion € investment is not comparable to a single nuclear plant.

And realizing ten times the current building capacity for nuclear plants with the same (or stricter) regulation and standards? That is almost delusionally optimistic.

> And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget.

All projects do, including wind and solar.

--- start quote ---

Ernst & Young (EY) has found that an average power and utility megaproject is delivered 35% over budget and two years behind schedule

Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budge. Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49% on average,

--- end quote ---

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-projec...

> And realizing ten times the current building capacity for nuclear plants

How much do we need to overbuild wind and solar?

Nuclear power projects are not just over-budget, they start off with a budget of a couple of billions, whereas individual solar or wind power projects are way smaller and therefor carry less of a risk. Nuclear power requires a huge financial backing from a single entity (even it is "fed" by multiple sources). Almost always, the risk is carried by society, the profit, if any is gobbled up by some corporation.

There is no need to "overbuild" wind or solar. There has never been any illusion those sources will produce at 100% capacity all the time. There will eventually be energy storage to level out the peaks, but most countries still have years to build up to the point where this is necessary.

Also, the decommissioning costs are really high, are usually not factored into the investment and often have to be absorbed by the state.

Current calculations from German decommissioning projects point at 10-20 billion per plant.

> Nuclear power has high upfront investments, always. And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget.

Which grid-scale solar projects have gone into production on schedule and under budget? Are there any?

Yes, it's actually pretty common. See comparisons across generating technologies in "An international comparative assessment of construction cost overruns for electricity infrastructure" [1].

Here's what the researchers found for solar (section 3.4):

Thirty-nine solar PV and CSP power plants, representing 2374 MW of installed capacity and $16.5 billion worth of investment, were analyzed. (These are utility-scale infrastructure projects, thus they do not include the familiar rooftop solar collectors on buildings or residential configurations.) These projects as a class actually came in $4.2 million less than budgeted, or $200,000 less than expected per project. These solar systems had the lowest average cost escalation per reference class (1.3 percent), the least time overruns (an average of 2 months ahead of schedule), and the lowest standard deviation for amount of overruns and time overruns. They also had the largest total amount of cost underruns, with the entire class of projects costing $163.9 million less than budgeted, though some of this may be explained by dramatic reductions in cost over the past 4 years. As Table 5 indicates, only 3 facilities had overruns greater than $50 million and only 3 facilities had cost overruns greater than 30%, all of which were CSP facilities rather than large-scale solar PV apparatuses.

Here are a few solar projects that outperformed in recent years:

O'Brien solar farm in Wisconsin, completed in 2021 on time and under budget:

https://www.boldt.com/project/edf-renewables-obrien-solar-fa...

Mount Signal 3 in California, completed in 2018 ahead of schedule:

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/12/8minutenergy-c...

Sun Streams 2 in Arizona, completed under budget and ahead of schedule in 2021:

https://www.enr.com/articles/55112-best-project-energy-indus...

Hillston solar farm in Australia, reached full commercial operation in 2022 ahead of schedule:

https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/hillston-solar-farm-mb24...

Kuala Ketil solar farm in Malaysia, completed in 2019 ahead of schedule:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/09/12/50-mw-solar-park-come...

[1] https://www.qualenergia.it/sites/default/files/articolo-doc/...

1) None of these are grid scale. 2) All of them are heavily subsidized.

The closest I see in that list is Mount Signal 3, which comes in at about 1/3 the capacity of a typical grid-scale generating station (1/6 if you account for the fact that it's producing zero power half the time, on average). It also chews up nearly 2,000 acres of land.

Hillston is 120 megawatts. Sun Streams 2 is 200 megawatts. Mount Signal 3 is 328 megawatts. The coal fired generating plants that retired in the US in the past decade were often smaller than that.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=7290

The table above shows that the coal generators that retired between 2009 and 2011 had an average size of 59 megawatts (MW). By contrast, the average size of a coal-fired plant planned for retirement between 2012 and 2015 is 154 MW, more than twice the average size of the units retired during the 2009-2011 period.

In 2022, coal fired generators had a capacity factor of ~48% in the United States:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Photovoltaic solar farms attained ~25% capacity factor in 2022:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

As a rough guide you can estimate that an American solar farm will generate about as much electricity annually as an American coal plant with half the nameplate capacity. Mount Signal 3 would roughly match a 164 megawatt coal fired generator for annual generation.

We were comparing nuclear and solar, not coal and solar.

164 megawatts (328 / 2, to account for the fact that solar plants are offline a minimum of half the time) is not anywhere in the same league as nuclear power plant, which are typically in the 2-3 gigawatt range, with modern large-scale plants producing 6-8 gigawatts.

The Mount Signal 3 plant also used up 2,000 acres (800 hectares of Imperial Valley farm land.

The inherent limitations are largely cost. Large scale underinvestment plus the financial failure of EDF very much demonstrate that.

The financial failure of EDF are mainly due to european regulations that forced price caps, making france sell at loss price when others needed energy last year (before the mess with plants breaking down everywhere)

Either way it's true that they let the situation degrade far too much while resting on aging infrastructure; it'll take a bit of time to get back on track whatever the direction is.

And those price caps are what kept French retail prices reasonable. Either somebody has to shoulder the high cost or maintenance must be neglected.

In France's case, we had both.

Meanwhile because cost cutting on maintenance backed up wholesale prices next winter are a blowout - far worse than Germany's:

https://www.archyde.com/french-electricity-prices-soar-for-w...

The running costs seem to be quite high too. The operator of Hinkley Point C in the UK for example receives a fixed "strike price" of 106.12£/MWh (currently) + inflation adjustment.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...

https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/cfds/hinkley-point-c

And it seems likely that the French taxpayer (via EDF) will be taking a loss even at that price.

Let's say this number is correct: Flamanville has cost a 1/10 of that and has produced 0 kWh, and won't produce any at least 20 years since the project began. Germany produces around 250 TWh worth of electricity per year from renewables, and has done so to an increasing extent in the last 20 years, especially in the last 10. Flamanville Unit 3, I haven't found the estimated production, but judging from the other two units existing it should be in the ballpark of 10TWh per year.

Nuclear has failed to scale, it's a well documented issue. If we want to decarbonize quickly, I cannot imagine how it can make sense to invest a 1/10 for a 1/25 of the production, and then wait decades longer for it. If decarbonization is the goal, projects like Flamanville are already a failure: even if finished it will take decades and decades to make up for the construction time during which it did not produce a single kWh and did not displace a single molecule of co2. Germany was over 50% coal 20 years ago, it would still be at this level if it had gone that route. It can't be the solution now.

> Nuclear has failed to scale

This reminds me of the joke "Fusion is 30 years away and always will be".

The reason is that a panel of scientist predicted various timelines of viable fusion between 30 years and infinity years based on effective funding. Ever since the funding for nuclear research was significantly below the level of the infinity years[0].

I suspect nuclear fission followed a similar path in the last decades.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...

> Nuclear has failed to scale, it's a well documented issue.

It hasn't, and it's not a "well-documented issue". What's documented is decades of FUD, fear-mongering, underinvestment etc.

> If decarbonization is the goal, projects like Flamanville are already a failure

Why not look at projects like Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant instead?

> will take decades and decades to make up for the construction time

Ho long will it take to overbuild renewables and all the required power storage for them?

E.g. right now, during the day, Germany's renewables are generating:

- wind: 20% of installed capacity

- solar: 34% of installed capacity

- pumped hydro storage: sucking up 8% of total power generation for recharging

> Germany was over 50% coal 20 years ago, it would still be at this level if it had gone that route.

Which route? E.g. France's carbon output from electricity generation is ~56g/kWh. Germany's is ~340g/kWh. Care to guess why?

It's well documented even by people in favor of nuclear. For example: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

> Why not look at projects like Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant instead

Because the person I replied to talked about Flamanville... Do you even read what is discussed or just frantically go from one post to the other?

I also posted how long it took to reach 50% renewables - 20 years, during which time the EDF/Areva failed to complete almost all of the projects they were involved with. If Germany had gone that route it would still be pumping out 800g/kWh like Poland does and it would be doing that for the last 20 years. Thank God it didn't make that mistake.

I talked about Flamanville because the article is about France and I mentioned France's underinvestment. If you want to talk about well funded projects then yes the Chinese have done a much better job. But you're not really talking in earnest.

I'll repeat again. Nuclear power projects in France took 20 years and were not completed because of underinvestment; about 10% of what the Germans paid for the Energiewende. If the French invested 10x more money, the industry could have been rebuilt. Instead they just perfuse enough to keep it half-alive.

So we should talk about that one that maybe was not a total disaster, but we should not talk about the three others that have been. I notice a lot of no true Scotsman rhetoric by nuclear people in general: France is proof we can build nuclear fast, but they didn't do it right by not maintaining properly. Germany is proof we can run nuclear plants efficiently, but they are incompetent for not being able to make it work. Etc. etc. If only the French had done this or that. But in the end it does not work.

You don't have to repeat anything, I heard you the first time. Flamanville cost a 1/10 of the Energiewende and its output is 0. Its theoretical output is 1/25 of the actual output of German renewables. That's not a good deal. If the goal is to decarbonize, Flamanville is already a failure, for reasons I already posted.

You say you heard me but didn't seem to understand it. That's okay, I notice a lot of misunderstanding of things by anti-nuclear people in general :)

(I'm copying your rhetoric in case you don't notice)

Thank you

Except my rhetoric is based on what you said (coulda would shoulda and it would all be peaches), not on made up impressions of other people. Living in a fact free world is also typical of pro-nuclear people. Take care. I will stop now, since some people got banned for flame wars already, and rightfully so.

Continued reliance on outdated nuclear technology might not have the same crucial global technology spillovers as investments in other clean energy (including advanced nuclear). Since the best path towards global decarbonization is through global technology spillover into emerging economies, the actors that have the best emissions score may, surprisingly, not be the most effective actors at reducing the global rate of emissions in the future. This has some counterintuitive implications. Consider that Germany has higher carbon emissions than France even though it has invested more heavily in solar than its neighbor, which uses much more nuclear. Should advanced economies like Germany leave their nuclear plants running? Perhaps, but it will not make a very large dent in global emissions because 75% of all future emissions will come from emerging economies, which will not adopt the kind of (non-advanced) nuclear power currently in use in Germany. Consider that German citizens environmental footprints are currently less than 4% of the global total, a share that is on the decline.

At one point, German subsidies drove ~⅓ of the global solar adoption, ~86% of which occurred outside Germany (6x) - see https://founderspledge.com/stories/changing-landscape#fnref1

Just a little comment for correctness, since April 15th, all German nuclear reactors are switched off.

Yup. And had to burn coal on that night because solar generation was at 0%, and wind generation was at 5% of installed capacity.

Germany would have had to burn coal that night anyway. The output of the remaining 3 reactors would have been only a fraction of the electricity requirements anyway. Meanwhile the buildup of renewables continues and part of the "lost" production capacity will be filled in soon.

> Germany would have had to burn coal that night anyway

But much, much less coal.

> The output of the remaining 3 reactors would have been only a fraction of the electricity requirements anyway.

That is s great way to say: we killed our stable source of electricity because of populism, and now we're burying our head in the sand justifying our decision.

> production capacity will be filled in soon.

Soon when? And the question of quiet nights remains

Somewhat less coal. We are talking about 3 GW less nuclear in a Grid which draws like 50. And yes, that were only the last nuclear reactors. But a lot of them would have had to be decommissioned anyway and there are still the problems of cost, especially of the nuclear waste etc. A large part of these 3 GW will be replaced even in 2023 and that will continue through the years. The current plans aim for 80 renewables in 2030.

> We are talking about 3 GW less nuclear in a Grid which draws like 50.

> A large part of these 3 GW will be replaced even in 2023

0% of solar generation and 5% of wind generation will be replaced with what exactly?

I forgot to mention in the sibling comment:

> in a Grid which draws like 50.

Installed wind capacity in Germany is 65GW. Seems to be much higher than what grid demands.

And yet, on April 15th it was producing only 5% of that. And solar was producing zero.

Guess where the power to cover that came from?

Even today on a reasonably windy day (at least in Hamburg where I am right now) wind production is at 20% capacity, solar at 36 capacity.

Busy burning coal for 21% of electricity even on a windy day.

You sure are fixated on nameplate numbers for those renewables that replaced all of the nuclear fleet and a third of the coal fleet already.

I don't think it's fair to compare the "little" 3GW with the total energy production. This is still power that must be replaced by coal and thus CO2 emissions. Yes, its 6% compared to the total energy production, but it's still extra unneeded CO2 in the atmosphere

That's a very good insight, I haven't thought of it. Germany has indeed turned the saying "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" into reality.

This is a pretty misleading piece. A couple of major errors:

The central argument is that renewables basically replaced nuclear in Germany. But that is not* what happened. Simply put -- the continued operation of coal generation replaced the shut down nuclear, nearly on a one on one basis. These coal plants, all of them, would have been shut down absent the atomausstieg. Today, Germany currently produces about the same amount of power from coal (~160 TWh/y) as its nuclear fleet did before the shutdowns began (~160 TWh/y). Had Germany not shutdown its nuclear fleet it would burn zero coal today -- and would emit ~130 million tons of CO2-eq less greenhouse gases.

While Germany did reduce slightly coal power generation, it did this by dramatically increasing renewable generation and* fossil gas generation. Recall that fossil gas electricity generation has increased massively since the nuclear phase out began -- increasing from by more than a third since the beginning of the phase out. I don't really think anyone would argue that renewables plus fossil gas backup can not replace baseload power -- it can, just not particularly cleanly or cheaply.

The problem is that the German approach -- despite spending over €500 billion on the energiewiende -- did not make a low carbon electrical grid. It made an expensive, dirty grid. In 2022, a kWh of power generated in Germany produced on average 385 grams of greenhouse gas (in CO2-eq) -- 2021 was barely better at 365 g per kWh. Compare that to France, where in 2022 a kWh of power produces 85 g per kWh -- 4.5 times* cleaner. Furthermore, power is dramatically more expensive in Germany -- in 2022, a kWh of power was €0.3279 in Germany vs.€0.2086 in France.

*Furthermore, there are basic errors here. Nuclear power doesn't need pumped hydro -- literally Germany has more pumped hydro than France, despite not having the "Alps" etc

Shutting down a third of something rather than all of it isn't "replacing nuclear" with it.

France's nuclear fleet is designed to use imports and exports to the rest of europe for storage to be economical. Somebody needs the storage.

These are just the same tired lies.

This is pretty much all false. The 500 billion figure gets parroted around a lot, but there is no basis for it. Also, coal use has basically almost halved since 10 years ago, and gas did not actually increase, it's still usually around 13-14%. In absolute numbers it went down because of less electricity use. The number are here, gas is in yellow: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...

The comparison is also not between France and Germany, but Germany now and Germany 20 years ago. The difference is massive, and the only counter argument can be that France did more with nuclear in the 70s and 80s, which is fine, but it's been the only country in the world that's done that, and France itself has not been able to replicate that. Germany on the other hand kickstarted a non-existing industry, that's been on an exponential growth worldwide in the last decade, and doesn't appear to be stopping. I think this comment in the thread was very insightful and should be read by everyone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711724

The article succumbs to wishful thinking in critical areas:

"So yes, Germany has a lot of gas-fired plants, and a lot of coal-fired plants, but they are actually used very little - only when demand (including from France) is very high and renewables supply is very low - which does happen, but not that often anymore."

This will continue to happen for the foreseeable future during the winter months. Solar is almost neglible, and wind obviously has slumps.

To fix this problem, the article brings up the recurring theme of saviour technologies that simply are not there yet: "flexible generation, whether hydro, new forms of storage"

Total consumption for 2021 in Germany: ~500TWhs [1]. That means ~10TWhs per week. At the moment our storage capacity is in the small GWhs ballpark [2]. We would have to increase this thousandfold. I haven't seen this gap adressed with actual projects yet.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/164149/umfrag...

[2] https://www.erneuerbareenergien.de/transformation/speicher/w...

I don't think this is wishful thinking as Denmark is ahead of Germany in switching to renewables and Denmark is already in the situation you quote.

Many people completely ignore how well EU contries are interconnected and how EU is pressuring Germany to become even more well connected to other contries.

So electricity generation in EU should never be considered at country level only.

Today it is windy in Denmark. Wind mills produce 103% of current consumption, solar 33%, bio/coal 17%. Surplus is exported to Norway, Sweden, Nederlands and Germany.

During night time this often switches around and we import from those contries. Most days wind blows in Denmark during day time and not during night time, so we are extra hard hit by up-and-downs in renewable generation.

Tech for long distance transmission of electricity has also improved a lot over the past years but this is often ignored when speaking about renewables.

Lack of sun/wind in Denmark correlates strongly with lack of sun/wind in Germany and surrounding countries. The importing of electricity works precisely because the surrounding countries still have the "baseline" power plants the article dismisses so boldly.

Transmitting electricity over larger distances remains very expensive, which is why the idea of using the African sun for Europe (e.g. Desertec[1]) has stalled [2].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmcgdh_0gyo

Current map of wind speed would disagree a lot with Denmark and Germany "correlates strongly": see https://www.windy.com/?55.670,12.530,5

Germany is a big country, so even internally in Germany there is a big difference: right now Stuttgart has 0 m/s while Sylt has 9 m/s.

Most wind power in Germany gets generated close to Denmark, in the northern plain and offshore in the North sea and Baltic. There are very few wind plants near Stuttgart. (There were lots of nuclear plants in Baden Wuerttemberg though - but they were switched off and not replaced by renewables.)

Apart from Denmark, few countries have enough wind turbines installed to power the entire country. Certainly, countries like Germany, The Netherlands, UK, don't come close. The Netherlands does come close to having enough PV to power the country during mid day on a bright sunny day.

So at the moment there is not a lot to export, and there is not of excess electricity from sun/wind to store.

The next thing is that, for example, The Netherlands needs a lot of green hydrogen for industry. So quite a bit of new wind turbine installations may go to powering that.

Germany has an other problem, building enough transport capacity within the country.

There is a big difference between transporting electricity all the way from Africa, including the question if it is smart to depend on those country for your electricity needs and transporting electricity between countries that border at the North Sea.

"Flexible generation" also means coal and gas... So it is not an elusive technology. Neither are hydro power plants which can be varied in their output.

The problem I have with nuclear is that I cannot isolate any technical discussion of sustainability pros and cons, the practicalities and realism of specific energy transition paths etc. from the stark fact that we (as homo sapiens) are an unreliable, warmongering, self-destructive species.

As we speak there is a war in Europe and - in case you missed it - there is a recurring death dance around a major nuclear plant in Ukraine [1]. How can we ignore the depressing reality that geopolitical strife is not under control?

For as long as the risks from deliberate attacks on energy infrastructure are within the realm of the likely the only sane approach is to ensure that such attacks would have only contained impact.

In other words, the menu of energy transition options we have is not independent from what sort of political world we envisage to prevail.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/26/war-zaporizhzh...

"Nuclear requires the huge volumes of storage/flexible capacity provided by large scale hydro": sorry, what?

Because electricity demand fluctuates. It's uneconomical to build enough nuclear capacity to satisfy peak demand. So even if you were to go to 100% nuclear, you'd have to store the excess power to satisfy the peaks.

What a load of crap. Nuclear has been load following (and required to load following by EU regulations) since forever.

Capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

That's not fast enough. Also, running nuclear plants at much below peak capacity is hardly efficient, increasing the cost.

Again: This is a problem no country experienced so far, because even France doesn't have that much capacity.

> That's not fast enough.

That's more than fast enough. You could see it in the graphs in the document if you bothered to read it.

Note: renewables like wind and solar are orders of magnitude slower, intermittent, and actually require grid-scale storage

You don't get the fact that nuclear power requires just as much storage, right

France has this problem in a hidden way: They have to import power in the summer, because they DONT have that peak capacity, nuclear or otherwise. To provide that with nuclear, they would either need storage or increase the number of their nuclear plants, and probably like 50%.

A couple minutes of grid-scale battery storage is doable, so it's plenty fast enough.

That's not how it works. I don't know the actual numbers, but what if peak load is 50% higher than average load? You need quite a lot of battery storage to make that work, especially if the peak load lasts longer than a few minutes (it usually does).

And that's true even assuming instant capacity adaptation. It's just not efficient to keep nuclear power at a capacity lower than their peak capacity.

> I don't know the actual numbers, but what if peak load is 50% higher than average load

You'd know if you read the link I provided.

Nuclear plants in Germany had no issues scaling up and down between 400-600MW and 1200-1400MW per reactor per day.

Now, with renewables you do have this issue. Because due to their intermittent nature you're required to both overbuild them and provide enough grid-scale storage to last for hours.

> It's just not efficient to keep nuclear power at a capacity lower than their peak capacity.

For some politically-motivated definition of efficient. Additional costs to running nuclear plants in load following mode are immaterial.

How is it immaterial to build twice as many nuclear power plants as necessary instead of using energy storage? You'd have to believe battery storage is way more expensive than an idle nuclear plant. But that's just not the case. The real killer in that comparison is that people really don't want to live near a nuclear plant and in any case, regulation and such politics makes it hard or impossible to scale up nuclear power in that way.

And if you have enough for peak demand (which France for a while mostly had), you run into the opposite problem of having too much power production when you don't need it. Nuclear reactors are not only slow to switch power output, but they cannot be run below a certain output level (like 40-50%) without shutting down entirely. On top of that, running nuclear reactors on average significantly below maximum output drives the cost up further.

> Nuclear reactors are not only slow to switch power output

This is not true

> On top of that, running nuclear reactors on average significantly below maximum output drives the cost up further.

It doesn't

Of course running below maximum output drives up cost. Are you disagreeing with basic math? Consumption of fuel is not the main cost of a nuclear power plant, and even if you shut it down completely, it still needs external power for the cooling.

Electricity demand does fluctuate, but so does supply from renewables. I think it is easier to store excess power than to deal with power shortage in case of bad weather.

Doesn't matter the source of the energy if you have to store it anyway. With nuclear power the "good weather" is the actual problem.

It is true that the problem of storing energy exists in both cases, but as far as I understand with renewables you lose reliability (in comparison to nuclear power).

In practice you don't. Nobody wants to transition to renewables over night. And so far it works quite well.

As gas fueled heating is phased out, most of Northern and Central Europe will get the same kind of seasonal demand as in Norway/Sweden. That is, much higher demand during winter.

There are very few places in Europe (outside of Norway/Sweden) where such long-term storage (sevel months worth) could be built at a competitive price. Currently, storage is usually counted in minutes to single digit hours, even in the optimistic plans.

So, barring some extreme breakthrough in storage technology, the only way to remove the reliance on fossil fuels, is to have significantly more plannable peak capacity than low season consumption.

In the case of nuclear, the main ways to bring prices down would be to create standardized and predictable regulations with a better thought out balance between the economic and health/safety costs, while also encouraging innovations and economies of scale to drive costs down in most other parts of the economy.

If costs could be reduced to €20-€40/MWh, some overcapacity would be ok.

I think his argument is that even when generation is consistently on some level, demand varies. And if you can't switch your nuclear generation into higher gear fast enough, you need some extra on-demand generation capacity. And if you can't switch to a lower gear fast enough, you can eg. pump some water uphill and have flexible demand.

Nuclear plants plants "change gears" at 3-5% of their nameplate capacity. https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

But is that enough? How fast does demand rise and drop on an average and a bad day?

There are graphs in the report.

But they don't because even operating as often as they are able, the french fleet makes a massive loss.

using surplus energy to pump water uphill and then when you need it, generate hydro energy by letting it flow down again. Just imagine a lake you pump up the mountain to later let gravity pull it down again through turbines ;).

Older generation nukes have atrocious throttle times and thus are pretty crap outside of baseline power. It's also one of the reasons they have the large cooling towers; to burn off excess steam whenever the reactor is producing more energy than the grid needs

>Is that what you usually hear? That replacing nuclear (a lot of it) by (a lot of) renewables will actually reduce fossil fuel use in the power sector? And yet it is the main lesson here.

I don't follow the logic whatsoever.

Doesn't matter if you follow that logic, it's what the numbers say.

Maybe it becomes clearer if you look at them, e.g. chart 3 on that page: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Yes that's pointing out the correlation once again, but it doesn't shed any light on what I'm confused by, which is why reducing nuclear power usage would have a causative link to reducing fossil fuel usage.

I think the key word you missed was "replacing".

Yes switching off nuclear and doing nothing else would have that effect. But that's not what they did, they pivoted to a renewable heavy grid.

If they pivoted to a renewable heavy grid, could it not be the same governmental policies which depreciated nuclear also depreciated coal/oil?

From what I can see Germany started giving governmental support to renewables in 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...

Also renewables simply just became far more economically viable relative to nuclear/coal/oil on a technological level in that time. So to me, the more natural conclusion is "why, renewables became more economically feasible, so they pushed out all these other forms of energy" not "Take out nuclear energy - and coal/oil fall like dominos".

I really don't understand the basis for the causation being drawn in the article.

The gist is that the carbon output from gas peaker plants is not that high because they don’t run that much more than under nuclear base load. Just at different times. Summer air conditioning peaks are shit on nuclear but great on solar for example.

> Summer air conditioning peaks are shit on nuclear

They are not, of course.

And I wonder who will take care of peak air conditioning on a summer night?

Presumably the other side of the planet blocking the sun's rays?

Ah yes. And you have cables sending you power from that other side, right?

It's also a good thing that such cables are entirely safe from being destroyed by enemies.

If transport over big distances wasn't a problem, both technical and political, solar would be the only source we need.

I've read here multiple times that a "small" solar farm in the Sahara desert would suffice to provide energy for all Europe. Even if you can solve transporting it, imagine what could happen if it's in, or the wires run through a country in civil war, like Sudan.

Yes, the problems with solar in Africa powering Europe are mostly political, not technical. Of course, a good intermediate step would be a big roll out of solar in all the southern EU countries. Which will undoubtedly come now that more and more countries push for renewables.

> If transport over big distances wasn't a problem

There's a project that's planning solar power generation in Morocco and a cable to the UK. That'll be a fairly long cable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco-UK_Power_Projec.... Though no idea how realistic this is, it seems a bit like a new electric car company website that only has a prototype. Meaning, it seems that project seems to not escape the planning stage.

There's already a lot of cables between the UK and other countries, e.g. Norway and France. Though those aren't that long in comparison to something connecting to the UK.

EU is trying to tie all the various grids of the various countries together. There are loads of initiatives around that. Aside from that the Southern EU countries are trying to connect their grids to North Africa. Though again, that's not a huge distance to cover.

> Though no idea how realistic this is

They promise to start delivering power in 2030, and estimate the project cost at 16bn dollars or something along those lines.

We all now how well it goes with mega projects :)

In Germany, there are only a handful of nights per year where you may want air conditioning. Most German homes don't even have AC.

Germany has other peaks. That's why nuclear reactors before they were shutdown were routinely going between 600-800MW and 1.2-1.4 GW per reactor per day: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

A thermostat with a timer that starts running at 3pm and a small sodium ion battery that costs less than the air conditioner it is running.

Yes but Germany seems to only be using 10% solar power. They seem to be using an awful lot of wind, and it was my understanding that how much power they produced was somewhat random but fairly close to constant over time.

I don't think the solar argument sounds intuitively wrong to me, I just would like to see the argument fleshed out in some more detail. I have an open mind I've just never heard this argument before.

Obviously, Germany has to install way more solar. Unfortunately, the previous governments tried to curb the installation of solar (and wind). But this is quickly changing now. Solar is especially easy to grow as there are plenty of unused areas (e.g. roofs) which can be used without much negative impact.

> They seem to be using an awful lot of wind, and it was my understanding that how much power they produced was somewhat random

The amount of wind that's produced is predictable. In NL they do "day ahead pricing". You can get energy contracts based upon those prices. It's pretty easy to predict the amount of solar energy and wind energy a day in advance. It's not random.

While people continue to push nuclear as a silver bullet, the painful fact is that nuclear won't be reliable enough in the dry Europe we are facing: Italy, France and Spain are in extreme drought and France in particular had to shut down nuclear power plants due to lack of water. In Germany rivers are also low and having plants like Isar 3 evaporate 770L/s is not sustainable in summer.

Wind and Solar can be intermittent but the drought is here to stay. A flexible system which reacts to electric availability is needed for the future. Wasting water in huge cooling towers will threaten food security.

What is the sea?

Not usable without desalination and far away from most reactor sites.

Power plant coolant does not require desalination, but it does obviously require that the plant be built next to the sea. Which works fine for the UK and France but Germany has less coastline and more of it is either national park, tourist destination, or busy port.

The problem of course is the proximity to power consumers or you have to expand the grid. Besides, coastlines are ideal places for wind power generation, which is why the north of Germany has no energy scarcity.

> The problem of course is the proximity to power consumers or you have to expand the grid.

What's your opinion on UK-Morocco powerline then?

Sounds like a P+R stunt so far to me. But it is doable, there is a working power line from Germany to Norway already. The only question is: is it a good idea to build a direct Morocco-UK power line or would it be more clever to connect Morocco with a shorter line to the central European grid and from there to the UK? Why should they sell to the UK and not central Europe?

But power lines can be built, no doubt. But then, as I said, you can as well transport wind energy from the coast to the rest of the country.

> But it is doable,

Funny how for renewables it's "certainly it's doable" and "powerlines can be built", but for nuclear "The problem of course is the proximity to power consumers"

You are twisting my words. It isn't a fundamental problem with nuclear, but with placing the power plants at the coasts. You might have made cooling easier, but increased the demand for the grid. That can be done, but should be mentioned. Especially in the context I wrote, but which you didn't quote, that at coasts there is no scarcity of wind, so it is way easier to build wind power there than nuclear.

> but with placing the power plants at the coasts. You might have made cooling easier, but increased the demand for the grid

How is this any different from offshore wind farms or power lines from Norway to Germany?

> it is way easier to build wind power there than nuclear.

Why not both?

Because nuclear power projects are never finished on time and within budget. Partly for political reasons (as in: People really don't like it), partly because engineers suck at estimating large projects.

Then why not simply build them on unpopulated coasts in Scandinavia, and run HVDC links under the Baltic? If it's good enough for solar power (not enough sunlight in Europe? Just offshore it to Africa [0]), it's good enough for nuclear fission. Extra plus, it's much closer, and all of the countries involved are low-risk, stable democracies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35611806

While it is not within the remit of the Bundestag to build reactors in Scandinavia, it looks like things might be heading in that direction anyway: https://www.ft.com/content/f55b69a4-ee37-4182-88bb-3a8dec93b...

(and of course the last time Germany tried to use Norway to help build a nuclear reactor, the Allies blew it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage )

I do think lots of things might be feasible for European energy, but they all cost money, and in the case of Germany the lignite lobby has been far better at not getting shut down by environmentalists despite doing a lot more damage.

The obvious thing for Germany was to replace lignite with gas powered plants. Gas plants have to advantage that they are very compatible electricity from sun and wind. And even without that directly reduce CO2 emissions.

Where this plan went wrong was when they picked the cheapest supplier of this gas, Russia.

Actually, Norwegians blew up the heavy water plant.

Nuke plants can use seawater for cooling. Most people live near the water.

Here's an idea – build newer reactor sites near the sea, like (as you'll see from this map) a lot already are: https://www.nuclear-transparency-watch.eu/wp-content/uploads...

A large body of water that impacted Fukushima.

Fukushima:

- hit by earthquake at or above upper structural limit. The most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan

"maximum ground g-forces of 0.56, 0.52, 0.56 at units 2, 3, and 5 respectively. This exceeded the seismic reactor design tolerances of 0.45, 0.45, and 0.46 g for continued operation, but the seismic values were within the design tolerances at units 1, 4, and 6"

- hit by tsunami exceeding that limit

The largest tsunami wave was 13–14 m (43–46 feet) high and hit approximately 50 minutes after the initial earthquake, overwhelming the plant's ground level, which was 10 m (33 ft) above the sea level

---

This resulted in 1 (one) death directly attributable to the incident

> This resulted in 1 (one) death directly attributable to the incident

Plus more that 200 billion $ paid by tax money that are NOT accounted into the cost of nuclear energy.

Plus more deaths, injuries, loss of property value, etc due to the evacuation.

Plus the economical impact of having stricter building regulations in future to prevent the same from happening again in future.

This was the very definition of a black swan event.

Imagine if all dams were subjected to the same insanity after dam failures like Banqiao Dam failure

Most dams carry way more risk and way higher benefits.

> won't be reliable enough in the dry Europe we are facing: Italy, France and Spain are in extreme drought and France in particular had to shut down nuclear power plants due to lack of water.

No, no they didn't. The shutdown due to "lack of water" (which is also bullshit) affected 0.18% of power generation.

The shutdowns happened due to planned maintenance when French government finally got its head out of its ass long enough to realize that power plants need to be maintained.

If the Chinese can “channel 44.8 billion cubic meters of fresh water annually”[1] with one of the world's largest mega-projects then I imagine Europe as a continent putting their heads together can figure out how to provide/redirect sufficient water for a bunch of nuclear power stations.

Also, there may be areas prone to drought but there's simultaneously plenty of precipitation[2] across Europe; heck – build nuclear power stations along the West coast of Ireland and send the juice across the interconnectors[3][4] to the UK and France

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...

[2] https://vividmaps.com/precipitation-in-europe/

[3] https://www.soni.ltd.uk/customer-and-industry/interconnectio...

[4] https://www.eirgridgroup.com/the-grid/projects/celtic-interc...

Once you do any of the sort, nuclear power loses the rest of its cost advantage (if there is any to begin with).

Finland's new 1.6GW nuclear reactor, the largest in Europe, uses sea water for cooling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Just 1.6 GW for 11 billion euros and a 14 years delay...

Meanwhile Germany has added 2.65 GW of solar power in Q1/2023 alone: https://www.pv-magazine.de/2023/04/20/photovoltaik-zubau-im-...

2.65GWpeak... all of which runs at a capacity factor of about 11% on average, and delivers energy at inconsistent inconvenient times. Won't run your heat pump in a December night for sure.

So the solar energy gets supplemented with bulldozing villages every year to mine lignite in Garzweiler instead. Yay?

Bullshit. Germany is still a decade or two away from needing energy storage to even out renewable power peaks. Until then, all the capacity provided by renewable sources reduces the overall emissions, which is the reason we are doing this at all.

The purpose of building up renewable energy sources right now is NOT to sustain peak loads entirely from renewables. But such simplifications are convenient, right?

That's great that Germany has that option. Finland is quite a bit further north, and doesn't get much solar during the winter months when it needs it the most. There's a lack of mountains an fjords as well, so hydro is also hard to come by.

TL;DR: No

Some physics: raising 1kg of water by 1k takes 4184 J. Evaporating 1kg of water takes 2260 kJ. Notice the k in kJ. That's 500x better.

Regulation has changed, and you can no longer cool down a react by heating river water. You can't raise it more than 4 degrees anymore. And that's taking down about 1% of the reactor's operating time, at a time of the year there's no hard need for energy anyway.

Now, you just change the cooling system. That's a fairly simple, non-risky modification, though a bit costly. And you get more than 100x bang for the buck. For like a drop in the river's capacity that would have evaporated anyway elsewhere (and goes up in the atmosphere to rain down at a much needed time in the summer). But it's gonna be an eyesore, which might have been why they didn't build them like that originally.

Germany is now a net exporter of energy, but is going to become a net importer precisely because of nuclear phase-out. As described in the IEAs report [0]:

"The government expects it can meet future generation needs after the nuclear and plannedncoal phase-outs with additional renewables capacity, energy efficiency measures and increased imports (given an estimated 80 GW to 90 GW of overcapacity regionally) (Eckert, 2019). However, Germany’s switch from a net exporter of electricity to a net importer will also have implications for regional power generation adequacy."

[0] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/60434f12-7891-4469-...

No doubt a hard decision, but IMHO it's correct. Accidents do happen and are extremely hard to deal with. Trying to increase safety has resulted in expences and construction time hugely increasing. The only countries that can deliver nuclear reactors mostly on time and on budget (China, Russia, SK) are the ones that are known to skip on safety.

You do realize that France right next door has tons of reactors and are building more.

> are building more

Fun fact: In the last 20 years France has reduced its nuclear power output by just about the same total amount as Germany.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-energy-generation...

Plus Czech Rep, Austria (and Switzerland) all have plenty of nuclear plants and energy, and will fight the EU to keep them. Germany stance is ideological at best and irrational at worst. Time will tell if it works well for German in the end. Unfortunately their recent track record with risky decisions is not great (I refer to the refugee crisis and the reliance on russian gas).

Bullshit. There was no "decision" in the refugee crisis, we had to take in the refugees because of our constitution and frankly because we (constitutionally and fortunately) don't have the means to get rid of them even if we wanted to.

So far everything works well for Germany. Relying on Russian gas meant cheaper power for quite some time. Hard to tell if alternatives would have fared better. Hindsight is always 20/20. Putin's invasion of Ukraine is irrational from any standpoint and not expecting him and his country shooting themselves in their feet that way wasn't illogical.

To be honest, there were plenty of warnings. Putins wars in Chechenia, Georgia. And he actually invaded Ukraine in 2014. That was the last date after which the German government should have planned for a future without gas from Russia.

Which isn't what you and others said at the time, I'd guess. Hardly anyone was advocating for this. None of the major parties for certain. Nobody wanted more expensive energy.

Sorry, why would you say such a thing about me? I was actually quite concerned by the absence of a strong international and especially German reaction to the invasion of 2014. Especially it became obvious, that all the Nordstream pipelines were a weapon against the Ukraine.

Those voices just weren't there and it is plenty easy and convenient to say "I was concerned way before everybody else knew of the problem."

Sure, but I wonder which basis you have to attack me personally. Especially since we mostly seem to agree on the topic of the discussion.

I don't believe people are special.

>Austria

You are completely wrong there, Austria is the biggest anti-nuclear zealot in EU, they are the reason why investments into nuclear are not considered green (effectively stifling development of it).

France needs to buy electricity from Germany because reactors are down or can not function because the river used for cooling is to hot already. Water problems will get worse in the following years. The nuclear operating company is bankrupt and needed to be nationalized. Not really the best look for nuclear. In other countries it might work better.

> France needs to buy electricity from Germany because reactors are down or can not function because the river used for cooling is to hot already.

Right now electricity maps shows that France produces 60% of electricity from nuclear, imports zero from Germany, and exports 6% of generated electricity to UK.

Also right now Germany generates 26% from coal and 9% from gas.

Just wait until the summer. Also exports from Germany to France did indeed decline due to the transition.

Here is the historical data https://www.ceicdata.com/en/germany/electricity-imports-and-....

Doesn't this show how much Germany imports from France?

I read it the other way but I can be wrong. Still Germany is reported as a net exporter: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-....

Can anyone calculate how many million tonnes of co2 was created because the "greens" (reds) wanted to shut them down?

Nuclear power projects are always finished late and way over budget.

There's definitely a pattern there.

How many plants were shut down because of water supply and how many due to planned maintenance and underinvestment of France govt last 10 or so years(bc of same 'green parties' as in Germany)? Asking because here I see there were only two (of 56 OPERATIONAL): https://www.thelocal.fr/20200825/france-authorities-shut-dow... but maybe you can find more info?

> How many plants were shut down because of water supply

0.18% of power generation

> how many due to planned maintenance and underinvestment of France govt last 10 or so years

And that is the main problem.

> China, Russia, SK) are the ones that are known to skip on safety

And you have sources on this except opinions and FUD?

That position might have had some merit if the replacement wasn't lignite burning plants, which score way worse on safety.

It's not the replacement. The argument that "lignite" plants replaced nuclear power is mostly wrong. Especially not long term. But this argument is highly convenient for people who are delusional over the benefits of nuclear power.

There is a distinct increase of coal-burning plants in the article a couple years ago, suggesting that they are partially a replacement. But what I actually want to highlight is that every nuclear plant closed instead of a closed coal plant shows how much safety is valued by those making decisions.

Because coal plants have been allowed to remain after forced closure of nuclear plants, safety is not the actual reason why nuclear plants are removed in Germany.

Those coal plants aren't operating at peak capacity, or at all, in some case. The suggestion they are replacing nuclear power 1:1 is a highly convenient lie.

The idea that coal power is less safe is bullshit. Nuclear power carries tail-heavy risk, coal plants have much more predictable risk. Nuclear power is only safer if you assume nothing happens that didn't happen in the past few decades and nobody actually deliberately blows up a nuclear power plant. Once you can't assume both, all risk calculations for nuclear power are meaningless.

Operating at less than peak capacity doesn't make burning coal any more healthy, and doesn't make the decision to not retire them any more safety-oriented.

You still don't understand. A coal power plant that doesn't run doesn't produce harmful emissions. And at lower capacity they produce less emissions, proportionately.

And you are still lying about coal being the only replacement for nuclear.

That's right, plants which don't run don't produce emissions. But they don't produce energy either.

But read the article and look at 2020-2022: coal energy generation increased while nuclear decreased:

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

This is a situation incompatible with a policy of increasing safety. Increasing safety means shutting down unsafe sources while keeping or rolling out safe sources, which is the opposite of the short-term trend. So the short-term policy goal was something other than safety.

You can't prove a long term trend via short term observation. That's kindergarden level...

Let me spell out what short term phenomenon I'm addressing:

"the short-term policy goal was something other than safety"

You broke the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly in this thread. Doing that will get you banned on HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35717960.

Germany keeps expanding coal mines.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2023/01/luetzerath-protest...

German TUV director on nuclear power plants: "The plants are in a technically excellent condition," Joachim Buehler, managing director at TUEV, told Reuters, adding that an extensive check, which is usually done every 10 years, was necessary but could be done within a few months.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germanys-gas-crisis-...

Safety you say?

How many people do you think have died from nuclear reactor accidents the last century? I ask because they're shockingly few.

In fact more people have died from radiation from coal plants than from nuclear plants.

The safety argument isn't based on numbers, but on fear.

Past history is a bad indicator for future risk when the costs are so high.

And the reason why there were so few fatalities was because huge chunks of land have been evacuated every time and costly cleanup operations have been undertaken. The risk is not just lives lost, but rather the impact on those countries' economy.

> I ask because they're shockingly few.

Only if you believe the official numbers about Chernobyl, which are worthless. The Soviet Union and later Russia was not being transparent.

> The safety argument isn't based on numbers, but on fear.

Very well-founded fear, based on how bad nuclear accidents can be, how bad people suck at adhering to safety protocols when there haven't been accidents for a long time, and the possibility of such accidents even being caused intentionally.

> Only if you believe the official numbers about Chernobyl, which are worthless. The Soviet Union and later Russia was not being transparent.

Take the worst number you can possibly imagine and then compare it with known numbers for hydropower. I'll take nuclear, thank you very much.

Nuclear power plants continue to have a DRAMATICALLY better safety record than the lignite plants that Germany continues to operate, so your argument doesn't make sense to me. Dramatic as in we could have a yearly nuclear meltdown worldwide and the safety record would still be better.

If anything you're more pointing out how hysterics over nuclear safety ended up endangering lives in practice by promoting the use of more dangerous forms of energy which don't arouse public fears as much since they kill people in an indirect and gradual way with unclear causation. Whereas nuclear kills people directly and suddenly with obvious causation.

You ignore fat-tail risks. The incident in Fukushima is already hugely expensive and the expense keeps growing.

Relying on past frequencies for future risk assessment is dangerous, especially when there is this high of a cost. Especially on the organization level of the decision makers: Maybe on average the risk for the global population is acceptable, but if a country like Germany loses part of its territory to a nuclear accident, that would be huge tragedy for the country and its economy. Germany is NOT replacing nuclear with lignite 1:1, much less in the long term. Anyone who says so is lying. And even those plants MAY have more risk, but that risk is hugely more predictable!

I am accounting for fat tail risks, I'm literally accounting for a nuclear accident happening every year, how is that not a "Fat tail risk"? The plausible fat tail of nuclear accidents being the everyday of lignite is the problem, the death toll of lignite is in the ballpark of 1000x higher. Having CONSISTENTLY 1000x higher deaths is not really a merit.

Sure nuclear meltdowns making territory unusuable sucks, but the mining does actually present a fair amount of ecological damage itself, and I think there's more metrics than potential territory loss. Notably lignites causes more radiation to enter the atmosphere, but unlike nuclear, this isn't neatly concentrated in one area people can just stay out of, which isn't conducive to people not dying.

I could maybe humour the argument that nuclear waste storage (Even accounting for these being very little of it, there will be very little of it for a very long time) or especially nuclear power plants encouraging nuclear weapons development being fat tail risks, but accidents, no. We're never going to see dramatic nuclear meltdowns even get close to causing the death toll of lignite, it just is way too implausible.

It is not only the death count. Large parts of Bavaria are still contaminated from the Chernobyl accident. They decontaminated most fields, but mushrooms and especial wild boar from the forests (they eat the mushrooms a lot) are only to be eaten with care (and the pigs should be all checked for radiation whether they are safe for eating at all, but of course that doesn't always happen).

I agree that it's not only the death count, but what do you do with contamination caused by fossil fuels? The radioactive isotopes released by burning coal are released gradually and everywhere, not concentrated into a certain region. If you want to eat mushrooms at all, you will eat mushrooms with coal-related contaminants. How much damage is that worth?

At least with Chernobyl, you can escape contamination by avoiding Bavarian mushrooms.

You are still assuming that the only alternative to nuclear power is coal power.

That right there is a big fat lie and makes all your arguments worthless.

Right, the alternative are renewables and if the previous governments had not screwed up the transition, coal would play a much minor role now.

I'd like to see some sources for the claim that this death toll is so much higher - on a per kW basis. And even that assumes that scaling up the number of nuclear plants scales the risk up linearly, which is probably impossible because regulations, standards and democratic participation would have to be lowered.

How would you convince me to take a guaranteed small cut to my life quality compared to taking a very low chance of earlier death?

In the end, the high impact risks of nuclear are of extremely low probability, and they compound better than fossi fuels: we have 1 30km-radius exclusion zone and some smaller non-exclusion cleanup efforts for some 1PWh(? can't find the number right now) of energy total. When an event like that happens, the affected population is tiny, and they are able to move out at a moderate one-time cost.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel generation downsides are inescapeable: every plant decreases the quality of life for every person, and we cannot escape it. How many people have died early because of the unescapeable, permanent health damage for each PWh of energy produced? There's no exclusion zone at all, so there's no ability to pay a one time price and be spared the long-term effects.

Which kind of generation has "this high of a cost"? What should be the average damage to the population which we take as a baseline?

You're still lying about the alternatives to nuclear power. You are still underestimating the impact of a nuclear disaster. You are still underestimating the risk of a nuclear disaster. These things have always occurred more frequently than expected, and we haven't seen anyone intentionally blow up a nuclear facility yet. The possibility for someone to actually make that happen intentionally (as supposed to the also criminal but less intentional neglect in the case of Fukushima) makes the risk calculations around nuclear impossible.

You are spreading FUD and fearmongering about nuclear.

We've had 60 years of nuclear and thousands of reactors. Still waiting for those terrorists I guess.

> as supposed to the also criminal but less intentional neglect in the case of Fukushima

Which is also a load of bull, mostly. I wish all criminal neglect was on the same level as Fukushima, really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711895

We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines extremely badly and often. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35717990.

I'm not estimating anything, I'm asking you to provide the proof of coal's superiority over nuclear. If the numbers are so clear in favor of coal's guaranteed damage against nuclear's risks, you should have no problem convincing me.

So go ahead, show us the estimates. And if you say that estimating is impossible, then why do you insist my estimate is wrong? Sorry, I'm not buying the "impossible" part. Show us the data and the reasoning.

My point is actually that the risk of coal is calculable and the risk of nuclear is not. And if you provide any estimate, it is most certainly wrong, because it is based on false and dangerous assumptions.

Yet you repeat the lie that coal power is the only alternative to nuclear. That convenient lie is the core assumption between most or all your arguments.

Estimates are by definition most certainly wrong. And despite that, you think your high estimates are better than my low estimates. By your own logic, you're wrong and lacking an argument. Claiming that coal is better than nuclear is wrong by your own logic.

And if there are wrong assumptions stopping a wrong estimate, then certainly replacing them with right assumptions will make an estimate less wrong?

Also, please show where I say that coal is the only alternative or shut up. I'm only talking about coal because it's such a weak hill you chose to die on.

There are many types of nuclear reactors and fuel types used. They can be quite different in operation and risk.

And most of them are not a commercial reality or viable option for at least a decade or so...

The Soviets had one accident: Chernobyl. The USA had one: Three Mile Island. The Japanese had one: Fukushima.

To the best of my knowledge China has had none and South Korea have had none and the Russians (non-Soviets) have had none.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...

The Chinese ramp up in nuclear power is fairly decent. Give them time. Unfortunately I don't think they will have more luck in terms of safety, rather the opposite...

The Fukushima incident was a result of regulations being too weak or ignored and the government not keeping good enough tabs on the operator. I really don't think the Chinese government does a better job. They suck at regulating and enforcing plenty of things they care about.

Very misguided opinion piece... in my opinion. It's hard to think and reason clearly about these issues, it seems. Especially for the German public.

The commentator is French

Right. And in reality discussing French energy politics by reflecting on the German politics.

Yes I know, I was referring to the debate in Germany itself. I think it's genuinely hard for most Germans, due to the anti-nuclear culture.

As someone who is mostly neutral on nuclear power: The pro-nuclear fanboyism I see on Hacker News and large parts of Reddit is mostly as irrational as the anti-nuclear culture in parts of Germany.

Any thread that mentions "energy" and "Germany" here is full of completely full of incorrect facts about Germany energy infrastructure.

Very hard to reason about. I got that wind turbines do not actually produce more energy than was needed to build them. This is not shown in these charts, i.e. the energy needed to build the wind turbines was largely used outside of Germany, it was part of the price buy them.

edit: thanks commenters, i stand corrected

> I got that wind turbines do not actually produce more energy than was needed to build them.

Wind turbines generate way more power than what is needed to produce them. Loads of wind turbines will be installed in the North Sea by various countries to generate a huge amount of electricity. I really don't get how you'd think that creating a wind turbine requires way more energy than the electricity it'll produce.

Not true.

> A 2014 study which looked at the same issue found that 2-megawatt wind turbines installed in Northwest USA paid for themselves in 5-6 months.

> A 2010 analysis of fifty separate studies found that the average wind turbine, over the course of its operational life, generated 20 times more energy than it took to produce. This level was “favourable” in comparison to fossil fuels, nuclear and solar power.

https://fullfact.org/online/wind-turbines-energy/

> A 2014 study which looked at the same issue found that 2-megawatt wind turbines

And such wind turbines are nowadays tiny. If you look at https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_windmolenparken_in_d... (Dutch) the column "Turbine vermogen" shows the (average?) megawatt (MW) of the windturbines. The ones planned for 2023 are 11 MW. The ones delivered in 2021 are 9.5 MW. There's a planned windpark with 14 MW turbines for delivery in 2026.

It boggles my mind that they would turn off the cleanest, most consistent power supply that exists, now.

"Focus is renewables, not baseload" - that doesn't even make sense, you still need the latter to heat a country through winter (or cool it down during summer, in case of Australia). So I guess on the flat, overcast days they'll burn coal instead, which has its own horrible mix of emissions. Or gas. Bravo, genius.

I'm all for green energy etc, but the focus must be on reducing total emissions. As someone who likes charging their EV from the sun I have experienced how bleak it gets during the Melbournian winter - I'll get 3-4 kWh in a day at worst/too often - maybe up to 8 more normally, compared to closer to 40-50 kWh on my 6.6/5 kWh PV system (rarely less than 30) during summer.

It boggles my mind that Germany can decarbonize so much and so fast and so cheaply over 10 years and yet the story it is routinely spun into is that it is a shameful abject failure because in the process of doing that they switched off an aging, overpriced source of green energy that comprised just 6% of their usage.

I think the respective attitudes pro nuclear advocates have to Poland (80% coal->80% coal) and Germany (10%->50% renewables) kind of underscores that nobody is shaming Germany for climate reasons.

> It boggles my mind that Germany can decarbonize so much and so fast

Compare it to France which didn't have to decarbonize to begin with. Because of those bad-bad-bad no-good reactors.

France needs to and is decarbonising. Electricity is perhaps the most important (because of electrification) but it's not the only sector. Plus France's electricity has always had the last 20% to deal with.

> France needs to and is decarbonising.

In Europe only Sweden and Norway have lower carbon emissions from electricity generation than France.

France didn't decarbonize deliberately and they did it 50 years ago decades before anybody paid any attention to global warming.

Meanwhile theyre becoming progressively more aware of the extreme costs of staying nuclear - costs they kept halfway reasonable by neglecting maintenance which is now biting them back.

> costs they kept halfway reasonable by neglecting maintenance.

That is not how you keep costs reasonable. You're just postponing them until they become unreasonable.

Correct. France built its reactors after the oil crises of the early 70s to guarantee its energy independence. The irony being those same plants failed at the time of the biggest energy crises since then.

> The irony being those same plants failed at the time of the biggest energy crises since then.

They didn't fail.

They failed. A quarter was out because of faulty pipes and another quarter was out because of planned maintenance. France had to rely on its neighbors to keep its lights on, and became a net importer of electricity for the first time in decades. And I repeat during the biggest energy crisis in 50 years, which was the entire reason for their existence. Can't fail in a worse way.

> France didn't decarbonize deliberately and they did it 50 years ago decades before anybody paid any attention to global warming.

Whether or not France did or did not decarbonize deliberatly is secondary to the fact that they DID decarbonize.

On the other hand, when Germany set out to decarbonize, they SHOULD look have looked at historical data for what actually produced the desired outcome. But instead they chose to replace their nuclear power with wind power, while keeping fossil power the same.

>keeping fossil power the same.

This is a lie. By all measures it has reduced.

In 1990, Nuclear power contributed to about 1800PJ/15000PJ of primary energy consumption, or about 12%.

Last year, solar+wind was 6%, or half that.

Then there is a large chunk from "biomass", which is all sorts of stuff, some good for the environment and some that are as dirty as most fossil fuels, but labeled "biomass" to greenwash them. (One of the worst cases, at least globally, would be firewood, especially in terms of local polution.)

At best, "renewables" can be counted to 17.2% for 2022, at worst it's about 6%.

Also, in absolute terms, total energy consumption in Germany has gone down, for several different reasons, but that would have happened anyway, it's not due to wind and solar.

> By all measures

In other words, it really depends on what measures you look at whether or not my statement was true.

I suppose I could be been more concise, though. What I meant, was that new clean energy (meaning primarily wind + solar) has AT BEST only replaced the clean nuclear energy that was available in 1990.

So in terms of available clean energy, simply maintaining those plants (or replace them when they could no longer be maintained) would have provided the same benefit as the massive investments in wind and solar (and those biomass types that are clean).

Still, a reduction in gross consumption is also a good thing, and _some_ of this may be connected to the increase in prices.

Then again, simply enforcing a carbon tax would achive the same.

> It boggles my mind that they would turn off the cleanest, most consistent power supply that exists, now.

The end of nuclear power has been a thing in Germany for the last 20 years. Changes of the required laws were already done in 2002, Fukushima was just another data point to stick to this plan.

Most reactors were EOL anyway and the energy providers wanted to offload responsibilites (and costs) to the public.

Nuclear power only made up around 6% of the total energy consumption of Germany, so it's not that of a big deal.

What we need in Germany (now and for the last 20 years) is less bureaucracy for setting up solar systems and lots of development for public/private storage solutions.

The future of energy is decentralized.

> Fukushima was just another data point to stick to this plan.

Fukushima wasn't a data point. It was a populist FUD talking point.

The mistake was made 20 years ago, and now the German public seems to start to realize that it was a mistake. For some of us, this is like seeing a train crash in slow motion.

During the tsunami in 2011 (that led to a minor nuclear incident), my facepalm moment was when I realized that the death toll from the tsunami would be eclipsed 1000-fold by the anti-nuclear fallout. (And the nuclear part would be eclipsed 1,000,000-fold).

That "minor nuclear incident" required a clean up that still isn't finished and already ran up a tab of about a trillion Dollars.

Pro-nuclear propaganda tries to focus on "only" one direct fatality, and conveniently ignores all the cost associated with not running up that number.

> required a clean

Expenditures on the "clean up" was beyond excessive. If Germany tries to "clean up" the harmful emissions from burning lignite to a similar safetly level, they will go broke.

Bullshit argument. How would such a cleanup even work? The claim that the Fukushima clean up is excessive is completely pulled out of someones ass. What would be the rationale? You DO understand that exposure to radiation is cumulative, and having radioactive dirt lying around or distributing through wind and whatever else is a problem, right? And we don't even perfectly know what damage that would do long term, if you just leave it alone. There is an exclusion zone around Tschernobyl for a reason. Japan can't afford such an exclusion zone.

Cleaning up "harmful emissions from burning lignite" is complete bullshit. How would that even work? For one thing those emissions or whatever is not radioactive, which is a big plus. For another, those emissions are continously reduced and once they are sufficiently reduced, the planet as a whole will actually clean it up by itself. This will take a long time, of course. Not as long as leaving nuclear waste and radioactive dirt alone and hoping it won't get blown around and harm anyone.

> Bullshit argument. How would such a cleanup even work?

The lowest radiation exposure that is scientifically proven to cause increased cancer risk is ~100mSv, and even then the risk increase is, well, almost unmeasurable.

> You DO understand that exposure to radiation is cumulative

It's not, though, or at least nowhere linear. For continous exposure, <20mSv/year is considered safe enough (if you're a flight attendant, for example). If you compress 50 years of that exposure into a single flight, you get 1000mSv, and probably radiation sickness, possibly death soon after.

When cleaning up after the Fukushima incident, the original plan was to scrub down areas and remove topsoil in areas with >5mSv/year exposure. This was later reduced to anywhere with >1mSv/year. Not only is that 20x lower than what is considered safe, it's also less than the average exposure from "normal" sources in most other areas.

Furthermore, when applying the $1 trillion number, it usually includes compensation to the population, primarily for the evacuation. That part is higher than the actual cleanup.

Now apply this benchmark to lignite. What are the lowest measurable exposure to pollutants that can be shown to increase the risk of severe illness (respiratory, cancer,etc)?

Now find that number, divide by 20, and do the same kind of cleanup (scrub down, topsoil reduction, etc) in all those areas where people are exposed to such levels of pollution. (Hint: it will be most of Germany.)

Then evacuate all areas where people are subjected to health hazards comparable to 50mSv of radiation, from lignite polution. (Probably millions, if not 10s of millions).

On top of that, provide compensation to anyone that has been affected by such polution, at the same amount per unit health impact, as well as, obviously the evacuation above.

Obviously, this is impossible. Germany simply doesn't have the economic resources to do this.

If the Japanese had the same standards for handling the effects of the Fukushima incident as Germans have for dealing with the ongoing polution from lignite, the "cleanup" would be quite cheap.

There is also wind. The mix of wind and solar works quite well in Germany.

Of course, from the carbon point of view, switching off nuclear before coal is a bad idea. But there are a few considerations to be made and the original plans were much more reasonable, but not executed.

- a large driver of decommissioning nuclear was about nuclear waste, safety and also costs

- the original agreement from 2002 didn't set an exit date but a total amount of nuclear energy produced. Which would have meant that some reactors would have ran into the late 20ies

- of course, the plan assumed build up of renewables at best speed

What where the deviations from that plan?

- the CDU/CSU+FDP government first prolonged the life time of nuclear, then after Fukushima shortened it beyond the original agreement.

- at the same time the CDU/CSU led governments from that on did not push renewables enough, at some time they actually started curbing the buildup. As a result, there is far less renewables in the mix than there could have been.

So the original plan wasn't that bad and has been screwed up considerably. Now we have to fix the situation but there is only one way ahead: continue with the switch to renewables at best speed.

I think it's too soon to reach any conclusions. Yes, Germany is shedding it's base load generation. Yes, so far that hasn't been a problem and Germany still has excess power to sell to France at peak market pricing. Let's at least get through a nasty Summer and a nasty Winter before we declare success.

I really hope Germany is successful and proves to be the model for the rest of the industrialized nations. But we don't have enough evidence yet to call this a success.

While overall power generation might benefit from the "shock therapy" of this kind, power-hungry industries do not agree and move their manufacturing to other countries.

This article shows that it pays off to diversify. Invest in all low carbon tech. -isms, be it pro- or anti-nuclearism get us nowhere and poison the public debate.

But "pro-nuclearism" is just being pro-science and pro-reality. How on Earth can that poison any debate? One side is lying and the other is not and you claim they are equally bad?!

To be in favor of nuclear power you need to ignore the fat tail risk structure.

And nuclear power proponents are using plenty of lies. Like the one where the only alternative to nuclear power is coal power.

What you claim to be "reality" and "science" is just a convenient selection of either. It is entirely rational to claim that the risk of nuclear power is not calculable, and to not have enough appetite to carry that risk.

"Future is not baseload except we actually need baseload, but let's call it by different names like flexible generation and magical non-existent new types of storage"

It's not baseload if it's not on all the time. The point of the article is that what was previously supplied by "baseload" is now generated from a flexible mix, with hardly anything generating 100% of the time.

It only means that there's still baseload, only covered by a much more fragile and complex system.

If there was no baseload you wouldn't care if intermittent power generation went to zero.

Because "Base load is the minimum level of demand on an electrical supply system over 24 h."

In most discussions about power generation, "baseload" is used to mean generation technologies that provide a constant, fixed output.

And one needs to understand that "base load" is mostly a concept important for slow, bad to regulate power plants. In those times, a lot of effort was spent on creating "base load" so the power plants have the least requirement for regulation. This will switch to more agile consumption where you get much cheaper electricity when you can time your consumption. So the amount of energy which was previously part of "base load" will be reduced considerably.

> base load" is mostly a concept important for slow, bad to regulate power plants.

You've just described renewables.

> So the amount of energy which was previously part of "base load" will be reduced considerably.

There's a minimum of required electricity that you have to provide every day, and you can't escape that.

Thanks for showing your skewed view on things.

No, renewables are easy to regulate and nothing about them is slow. You can regulate solar in milliseconds, wind in a couple of seconds. They don't have to produce when there is no demand.

And yes, you have to provide as much electricity as is pulled from the grid. But that does no longer have to be done in a constant fashion as with nuclear and coal. That is why I write that "base load" is reduced. Overall energy consumption isn't. It will actually rise with the electrification of mobility and heating. That is, why there is a need for a huge buildup of renewables.

> No, renewables are easy to regulate and nothing about them is slow.

Renewables are among the slowest power sources to ramp up production. Which is complicated by the fact that they are intermittent.

> That is, why there is a need for a huge buildup of renewables.

1. At what cost

2. What happens to generation on a quiet night?

Your arguments are fueled by a lack of understanding.

Ramping down renewables is lots faster and easier. The stability argument is just populistic bullshit. Plausible on the surface, not a concern in actual practice. You are acting like those who plan and build this renewable capacity never thought of that.

The goal with renewables is to reduce the total emissions. There are still plenty of years left in that process before you even need any storage to cover capacity fluctuation. Because even when covering SOME extra capacity with fossil fuels SOME of the times, total emissions are still getting reduced. Is it that some people just want to ignore that a coal plant that doesn't produce energy also doesn't produce emissions?

> Ramping down renewables is lots faster and easier.

Ramp me up solar production in midnight.

> Ramping down renewables is lots faster and easier.

And the source for this is? Because reality seems to disagree with you

> The stability argument is just populistic bullshit. Plausible on the surface, not a concern in actual practice

You're surprised that renewable energy is intermittent and you need to significantly overbuild them?

> You are acting like those who plan and build this renewable capacity never thought of that.

So many decisions in this space are made purely for political points, so you can see how yes, people who are building this rarely if ever talk abou this.

> The goal with renewables is to reduce the total emissions.

Note how if you don't shut down nuclear power plants you don't need to burn coal to make up for the difference.

Pumped storage, grid scale batteries and syngas all exist.

When combined with solar and wind they can all easily compete with nuclear power on cost, they're just more expensive than natural gas for peaking.

> Pumped storage

Very limited in where you can build it

> grid scale batteries

Don't exist. You severely underestimate the needs of the grid

> syngas

Aka burning furl and calling it carbon neutral. And have they passed the 1MW mark

>Very limited in where you can build it

There was a scientific study that looked this precise question and found 10x as many sites as necessary

>grid scale batteries Don't exist.

Your assertion is trivially disproven with a quick google.

>Aka burning furl and calling it carbon neutral

aka making hydrogen from excess solar/wind, storing it, burning it and turning that into electricity.

it's unfortunately only 50% efficient but that still makes it cheaper than nuclear power.

I think the opinion piece is overly reductive on what the strategy is, and that makes it easy to dismiss it in this way. Actually diving into the details paints a different picture.

The actual EU strategy hinges on multiple interacting elements. Making more of the demand steerable, to align peak use better with peak production. Overbuilding renewables capacity so it can still provide enough even at lower efficiency. Wind at sea at a never before seen scale (decided this week at the north sea conference) to have a form of base load (there is dunkelflaute but in general wind at sea is reliable at producing a certain amount of base load). And last but not least the EU hydrogen strategy, where a transport and storage network will be built similar to that for natural gas (in fact converting over that infrastructure), that then can be used to respond to demand in a steerable way, and that can be fed through shipping and pipelines from regions where renewables are most cost-effective at producing hydrogen.

Skeptics like to pretend the EU doesn’t have a renewables strategy beyond hope, but if you dig into it they (like in most things the EU does) have actually worked out a detailed and pragmatic strategy.

> The actual EU strategy

There is a strategy beyond populism and FUD?

> Overbuilding renewables capacity so it can still provide enough even at lower efficiency.

And the cost of overbuilding is?

> And last but not least the EU hydrogen strategy, where a transport and storage network will be built similar to that for natural gas

Again, some future magical solution with unspecified costs

> And the cost of overbuilding is?

For renewables? Absolutely huge. We would need 10-20x the nameplate power. Perhaps even more. The only reason renewables "work" at the moment is that all other energy sources work overtime to compensate.

(And the EU's hydrogen strategy is a huge green elephant -- but Timmerman has invested most of his political capital in it so the idea doesn't go away until he does.)

Meta comment.

Maybe i misunderstand the downvote mechanism on HN. IMO it should be used for inconsiderate, rude, spam etc. but not against an opinion you disagree with.

Everytime I post something against nuclear it gets a huge amount of downvotes. In this case it didn't happen to me, but happens to another user, see comments at the bottom of the tree.

I would say just don't upvote, or better write an argument why you disagree.

Otherwise leads to huge amount of group think because opposing ideas are pushed down instead of debated.

HN guidelines are explicit in that downvotes on a thing you disagree with are ok.

That said, I do at times upvote comments that I strongly disagree with but are nevertheless so well argued that I disagree with them disappearing. I bet I’m not the only one.

Speaking against nuclear energy on HN is like burning the Quran in Saudi Arabia.

The level of group think and indoctrination is hilarious.

Meta: If everyone else is downvoting your comment, the problem is definitely with everyone else, rather than with the content, style or factuality of your comment...

Meta meta: if everyone upvotes your comment, it's definitely because it's a correct argumentation rather than just confirmation bias.

Put that's kinda the point right. Downvote is now a mix of not liking how someone writes and opinion?

I get downvoting because of the Quran comment. However to apply your comment "something wrong" to an opinion sounds weird.

The group-think around nuclear power on HN is indistinguishable from religious fervor and doesn't agree with average public opinions in any countries I know of. Certainly not Germany...

Please don't break the site guidelines like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711703. No matter how right you are or feel you are, posts like that are abusive and only make things worse.

As for the community: it's clearly divided on this topic. Each side on any divisive topic complains bitterly about the other side and how it supposedly dominates HN. These perceptions are the product of cognitive bias plus ideological passion, and the comments they lead to are mostly flamewar noise. If you'd please avoid that, and stick to either (1) posting substantive, thoughtful, respectful comments or (2) not posting, we'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When I remember to do it, I downvote comments complaining about voting (yours too). Caring about number of votes seems narcissistic and in my opinion tries to turn HN into Reddit with all its negatives including karma farming. Downvoting is not flagging and there is rarely so many comments that downvoted comment would become effectively invisible at the end of xth page.

Yeah I don't think I'm complaining here. But pointing to certain dynamics.

There is a lot of the groupthink on HN, and this might be one of the mechanisms suppressing debating certain ideas.

Downvoting definitely surpresses well written contrarian arguments. It often kills the discussion by moving it down.

On a personal note. It's fun to see a comment get a lot of votes, and also fun to see it get a lot of downvotes. But I'm not very emotionally invested into it.

Once the world is fucked up because we failed to act, I wonder if ecologists who blocked our one way of solving the problem when we could will be held accountable.

Governments remain widely delusional so far and no other government is stepping into their bad decisions.

Ever questioned if maybe experts and politicians who deal with these issues daily are less delusional than you?

"Ecologists" weren't the ones who nuked nuclear. Popular opinion did. Impossible accidents happening a couple times too often didn't help.

Public opinion is entirely fabricated.

I wonder if people who stood by and did nothing will find a way to blame their failure on “ecologists”.

Imagine replacing nuclear partly with biomass and not taking the opportunity to phase out coal burning.

There's no rational argument that's pro "saving the planet" that can explain that. As in, zero arguments.

That's delusional, plain and simple.

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